I really appreciate all the ideas and effort you have put into trying to solve my problem: I have tried method 1 and worked on it for 3 hours and it does not work. and the download from Microsoft, only does not work with Vista Home Premium, I would have to have at least Ultimate. It just looks like I will not be able to run both Vista and XP on my computer. I just seem to be hitting my head against a brick wall. Thanks again

Hi William, thank you for a great tutorial.
I have a problem but it's kinda different than usual, i followed the tutorial and created a 30gb partition on my Vista PC's 400gb C: drive. i wanted XP on because i belong to a gaming clan and the primary game we play (DCX mod) doesnt run on Vista.
everything seemed to be perfect until i came to select XP from the duel boot option and it wouldnt run.
i looked at your screenshot of your completed bcdedit file and compared it to mine, it was almost identical apart from 1 entry.
Under my Windows Boot Manager, the device was listed as "partition=s:" instead of C: like yours.

My PC is a philips Freevents media centre PC bought from PC World 3 weeks ago and though it only has a single hdd there is a small partition of 1.49gb labeled (system)S: that only has 43mb of hidden system files on it. what this is i dont know but i presume this is the fly in my ointment :(

anyway this was my problem but isnt why i am posting a request for help... i got frustrated and decided that i would just do without the old game and XP and would just use the 30gb partition as a backup drive, i formated the XP drive (which was labeled D: and my Vista is C: ) but now when i start up i get the duel boot screen despite having formatted the D: XP Partition lol.
I followed your tutorial to create the duel boot menu at startup but i am embarressed to ask for more help to remove the duel boot menu so my PC fires up straight into Vista again :embarrassed:

sorry for the long winded post but i wanted to explain things fully, and i am sorry if this question has already been answered... i was reading through from the start but this thread is 32 pages long lol :embarrassed:

thank you :)

You should be able to remove the OS entry using EasyBCD boot manager.
Download EasyBCD 1.7.1 - NeoSmart Technologies

thank you :)

Dual Boot Vista and XP with Vista already installed
 

Hi, I'm trying to do a duel install with XP and vista. Vista being installed first. I followed your posting but whenever I try to in stall XP, it wants to format the C: drive because it says it's in an "unknown format". And when it's listed at the installation screen, it's displaying it as "Unknown file type instead of NTFS. The problem is Vista is on the C drive and I'm thinking I've done something wrong. Help!

Thanks for your excellent article. I have been slowly making sure I can do everything you suggest, especially the Vista repair, as the process of getting to the repair screen is different on my HP laptop. My problem now, however, is that the xp install disk doesn't see the new partition I made. I even went back and formatted it to see if that would help. It only sees 'c'. Thanks.

hi william,

i first dual booted vista after installing XP and it worked fine.
my XP was on drive C and Vista was on E....both were 64bit OS'es
today I downgraded my XP to 32bit and all this horrible things happenned but I saw your great article and managed to get to step 3. the thing is that I still no matter how I do step 3, the dual boot for vista won't show up and i'm stuck on XP. I also tried doing "bcdedit" on XP but it kept telling me it was not recognized. So I checked and realized that the file itself is not there. Can you please help on what is going on ? I've been trying to get it right for a long time now.....thanks william.....

It Works!!!
 

I'd like to thank to the author of this tuturial, William Wilson, for this article.
I did everything as explained and it worked just perfect.

The only thing I did different was using VistaBootPro and .NetFramework, instead of step 3.

Now I have both windows Vista and XP Pro working in my computer!!!

Thank you, William!!!

vista primary has 4 partitions
 

William looks like a very useful tutorial.

My problem is that my Dell with vista already has 4 partitions. C and D with two others, one is a Dell Direct media. My understanding is that there are a max of four primary and so I need a logicial for E: to install Win2000.

I have thought about it an I think that I prefer to install Vista in C and Win on E because I can easily remove Win200 with out changing Vista.

At the moment I think I need to reinstall vista to create a logical partition
using the vista storage manager.

LeRoy

All is well up to last part...
 

Okies. So I went through the whole tutorial, which made everything really easy. Everything went fine till the last bcdedit thing. I skipped it and went with VistaBootPro (already have framework). Now, this is what my bcdedit looks like

---------------------------------------------------
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
description Windows Boot Manager
locale EN-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
displayorder {current}
{ntldr}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path \WINDOWS\system32\winload.e
description Windows Vista (TM) Ultimate
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \WINDOWS
resumeobject {498df071-2318-11dd-aecf-80

Windows Legacy OS Loader
------------------------
identifier {ntldr}
device partition=C:
path \ntldr
description Microsoft Windows XP

--------------------------------------------------------

All is well, right? So I restart my computer and choose vista. Boots up great. I restart again and choose xp... it restarts my computer. I go through the HP logo... back to the option between the 2 OSes. I try choosing XP again... same thing. Restarts comp.

Any ideas?

Note: Vista is loaded on C:
XP is loaded on J: